Sophie Huckfield
Sophie Huckfield (she/they) is a working-class artist, designer and writer. They often work collaboratively, drawing on archival and research material to co-produce artworks that utilise film, sculpture, sound and writing to platform and reframe overlooked voices, histories, stories and experiences connected with the themes of labour, technology, craft, class and (de)industrialisation.
Huckfield will use their residency to explore the concept of ‘relief’ as both an emotional coping mechanism and as a creative act, drawing parallels between lived experiences of how we find relief and the wider art-historical context of relief sculpture. She will engage with ‘relief’ as a multilayered process: emotionally, how we find a release, and materially, through sculptural and industrial forms. The residency will contrast personal grief and her families history with broader social and industrial histories, focusing on Walsall’s leather industry and the decline of the high-street.
Through interviews, site-responsive filming, material exploration and writing, Huckfield will document one of the last leather saddle workshops in Walsall and the surrounding local businesses that depend on each other – leather tanners, buckle manufacturers, machine maintenance companies, betting shops – which form a delicate local ecosystem.
Biography
Sophie Huckfield works between Walsall and London. Currently, they are Stanley Picker Fellow at Stanley Picker Gallery, Kingston (2024-25). Upcoming exhibitions include a solo show at OUTPOST in Norwich, September 2025.
Their book, OUTWORK, which tells the stories of working-class women employed at Kenrick and Jefferson Print Works on West Bromwich high street, was published by Multistory Editions in 2023.
Recent exhibitions, screenings and performances include The Barbican, The Design Museum, London Design Festival, Dutch Design Week, Two Queens, Vivid Projects, and Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery.
Instagram: @sophiehuckfield
Open Studio event
Saturday 4 October, 2 – 4pm
Join artist Sophie Huckfield in the studio as they share experimental work created during the residency.
Free, all welcome.